None but the lonely heart

None but the lonely heart, the most famous of all Tchaikovsky’s songs, is another Goethe inspiration. The source in this case is Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, one of the several songs attributed in the German poet’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehjahre to the mysterious and waif-like Mignon, a child of a brother-sister relationship abducted from Italy and forced to work in a circus in Germany. A source of fascination to many composers – Schubert made no fewer than six versions of it – Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt has never been set to a more beautiful melodic line than Tchaikovsky designed for it in in his first published set of songs, the Six Romances Op.6, in 1869.